
i I 




fte "P S 3^0 ST 

COPffilGRT DEPOSm 



NEW YORK 
AND OTHER VERSES 



NEW YORK 
AND OTHER VERSES 



BY 

FREDERICK MORTIMER CLAPP 

'I 
Lieutenant, 22nd Aero Squadron, American Expeditionary Forces 

AUTHOR OF "on THE OVERLAND " 
AND "PONTORMO" 




BOSTON 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

MDCCCC XVIII 






Copyright, 1918 
By Marshall Jones Company 



All rights reserved 



Printed in the United States of America 







CONTENTS 

PART I 

Page 

My Own City 3 

Warehouses 4 

Steam 7 

Snow at Midnight: The Elevated 9 

Scores 11 

Plum Street 13 

Profits 16 

Trade 18 

Brooklyn Bridge 20 

Fulton Fish-Market 22 

The Bay: December 23 

The Library 25 

River Traffic 28 

The Park 29 

A Rainy Night 31 

Sky-Signs 34 

Backgrounds 37 

PART II 

Hush before Storm 41 

Leaving California 42 

For Ellie Come Back 46 

From a Cliff 48 

Northern Lights 49 

A Bust of Baudelaire 50 

Rewards 51 

Doors 54 

Caterpillars 57 

Sultriness in June 58 

Chimera 60 

Wild Geese: A Symbol 61 



PART I 



MY OWN CITY 

I HAVE drunk it in, 
as a cup of clear water set upon a house-top 
drinks up the sky 
and the wheeling of the moon, 
and the sparkling constellations. 
Its great grey jagged and smoking shell, 
like a cage dropped over the white fire of its heart, 
lives again in rippling cobwebs of ghostly gold 
among the hanging shadows of the river. 
But, in the creeks and inlets of my mind, 
it has made itself another life 
that the blue-rimmed glare of the hurrying day 
cannot burn away, 
nor the midnight's massive hand 
brush over the precipice of darkness. 
The mighty lacework of its bridges, 
its cliff -faced buildings, 
the stunning thunder of its streets, 

and the unheeding flashing cataract of its devouring life 
are the thoughtless loom upon which I have made my thoughts , 
And when I die, 

images on images of the grandiloquent city 
will live on their own life in my grave with me, 
like a pattern of embers 
buried in sleeping seas of sand, 
like a little handful of twinkling garnets 
hid in the heart of an ancient hill. 



[ 3 ] 



WAREHOUSES 

BEHIND the docks and under the bridge 
that swings from tower to mighty tower, 
black-lacquered with the lustre of the night, 
its palpitating roadway under the stars, 
warehouses — 
six-storied and interminable 
warehouses, shuttered with six times six 
arched doors of dull black iron. 

The long straight street has neither break nor turn nor crossing, 

and the arched and shuttered windows of the warehouses 

look at the windows over the way, 

as if they looked at themselves in an endless mirror. 

It is more lonely here at night 

than it is in Thebes or Karnak. 

An outcast silence, like a mangy dog, 

prowls through the golden pyramids of light 

that stand under sentinel gas-lamps, 

or sits with its feet in the black bar of the gutter, 

at the point of huge inverted 

triangles of shadow. 

This is the monotony and desolation of trade; 

this is the senseless and ghostly 

back yard of arithmetic. 

Behind these innumerable doors and iron windows, 

tier upon tier and arched and shuttered, 

bolt piled on bolt of the silks of Shantung, 

tea from Hanan and tea from Chang Sha 

in painted boxes, 

oil from the Lucan hills, 

cinnamon from Colombo, 

cloves from the Moluccas, 

pine-apples from Pernambuco, 

coffee from Santos, 

cinchona from Callao, 

[ 4 ] 



and the curd-white soaps that they make in Jaffa, 

crated in cubes and inert and labelled — 

quantity, quality, weight and size; 

and a hundred thousand sacks of grain 

in which lies hidden 

a whole fierce summer's sun on Dakotan prairies — 

a hundred thousand sacks of grain 

stacked like cubes and inert and labelled. 

There are floors that groan with figs of Smyrna, 

and Biskran dates; 

there are cumquats from the Inland Sea, 

crated and stacked and inert and labelled; 

there are stiffened hides of a race of cattle 

that hardly a year ago 

filled the skies with the dust of their trampling 

on Argentine plateaux, 

bale upon bale and inert and labelled. 

And all this harvest of the earth's vitality 
lies in these interminable and shuttered warehouses, 
as carnelians and agates and moonstones and turquoises 
lie in the rock tomb of a forgotten king. 

At night it is more lonely here 

than it is in Thebes or Karnak, 

here in this long straight shuttered street, 

here in the creeping contagion and paralysis 

of columns of figures 

in ledgers and cash-books. 

And yet I know that, beyond this silent street 

of the tombs of calculation, 

and its golden pyramids of gas-light, 

and its huge inverted shadows, 

ships with softly steaming funnels 

lie moored to shadowy wharfs — 

ships that have come up out of the sea 

with the mysterious starlight about them still 

of tropic lands, 

[5 ] 



ships with a dim shaded glow in their binnacles, 

ships with the slow swing of the Pacific 

still in their mast-lights, 

and, flitting about on their yellow decks, 

shapes that have leaned across a dewy rail 

and listened to the booming of the surf of Madagascar. 



[6] 



STEAM 

PATCHWORK of snowy roofs and sombre walls; 
a golden dome; 
an amber tower; 

tracery of drifting ice in the drab-grey river; 
a wavering whirlpool of swooping gulls. 

And, as on the face of a mountain 

full of hot springs, 

behind the river and over dome and tower, 

from slim straight pipes and squat square chimneys, 

rises a plumage of steam that flowers and fades, 

snow-white, and dies from strange shape into shape — 

unearthly melting peonies, 

dissolving polar bears, and filmy dragons, 

fugitive geni, floating sleeves 

of elves that lift a white arm to become 

banners and cipher-scrawls and full-rigged ships 

that billow down a running breeze. 

And to me, as I watch it, this changling puff -puff -puff, 

from the exhausts of hidden and unresting engines, 

and from the shadows that fall 

like unwound lengths of black cloth 

in the shafts of slim sky-scrapers, 

becomes the city's aspirations 

made visible, 

the fretful refuge of its defeated dreams, 

the white pulse of its life-blood foaming up, 

the frosted breathing of imprisoned forces, 

and the frayed symbol and enigma of 

faces that lean out of its windows 

and creep in millions through its million doors. 

In it I see the city's ineffectual past 

still faltering to 

to-morrow — 

[7] 



a Cyclopean unsubstantial world 

that streams away and slips into the invisible, 

through a lattice of giant shadows where 

the highest houses jut along the glint 

and fading quiver of the setting sun. 



[8] 



SNOW AT MIDNIGHT: THE ELEVATED 

OVER the city, 
from infinite heights, 
falls soundlessly, 
falls erushingly impalpable 
and sleepily windless, 
the soft and stealthy 
inexorable snow. 
It pads the world with silence 
like an immense and mute precipitation 
of some universal slumber. 

And the jaded city lets its blear blurred lights go out 
one by one. 

A snaky far-off purring roar that grows 

and grows 

and grows — 

a hissing smash and deafening gallopy clatter of ten thousand 

frantic hoofs — 
the dragon train, 
a wild unwinking eye of red, 
a wild unwinking eye of green, 
its belly full of blinding light 

that blares through eaten holes in its rattling hide, 
shoots 

in a shrieking paroxysm of speed, 
between the house-tops, 
over its tense humming spider-web of steel. 
And out of its clenched jaws 
drips, with slithering screams, 
tassels and sizzling fringes of a foam of fire. 
It claws a rain of green and purple stars 
out of the moaning rails, 
and the houses gasp in livid fits, 
convulse in spasms of terror and reelingly 
dash themselves on one another 
with gaping mouths and dazzled maniac eyes. 

[ 9 ] 



Flickering, 

gesticulating, 

they stagger backward from the dragon train 

and close behind it like twin tidal waves 

clashing — 

red toppling monstrous rigid waves 

with curling licking crests 

of swirled whirled snow. 

The snow is falling very soft and white, 

falling from infinite heights 

windless and thick; 

the city smothers in its frozen dreams. 

And the houses with enormous wigs of snow 

stand stiffened and featureless 

as huge unburied coffins 

upright, row on inert silent row, 

in a vast deserted graveyard. 

Only, receding far off, 

the dragon train 

howls 

faintly and yet more faint 

and lonely as a wolf. 

And its knife-like fringe of stars 

falls 

sputtering through the dense and unresisting 

unconquerable and soft 

down-sifting infinite 

snow. 



[ 10] 



SCORES 

ACROSS the square white glimmer of my window, 
^ straight as an unwritten score on a blank page, 
ten thin telegraph wires. 
Over the river and through the mist, 
a solitary gull 

floats up and down and writes against them 
the meaningless theme of the fog. 
And the air is a maze of anxious horns — 
a crawling and jumbled bass 
of moans and muttering tremors: 
the life of the river fights with the fog 
as with a phantom. 

Slowly, at the water's edge, 

the tarred roof of a wharf swims up like a piece of wreckage; 

like a long black log it bobs in the mist. And beyond it, 

rooted in the great red vase 

of a moored ship 's single funnel, 

a palm-tree of windless coal smoke 

rises and rises and rises, 

till its fronds are pushed back by the heavens. 

Last night the city filled my window 

with soaring cubes and towers 

cored and pierced with corrosive light. 

And who would have guessed that a million men 

sitting in such a corrosive light 

had made those glittering towers 

with the dots and strokes of their scheming.^ 

And who would guess they are there again, 

doubling themselves over desks, 

making their dots and dashes 

of hope and greed and devotion, 

somewhere behind the pausing gull 

and the unpausing coal smoke's palm-tree .^^ 

[ 11 1 



One of them may have just made some mark 

that will send this moored ship steaming 

into the creaking ice of the North, 

or beyond the glaring Equator, 

to Archangel or Samoa, 

to Cape Town or New Zealand. 

But he will never have seen this gull 
flap out the meaningless theme of the fog 
across these telegraph wires. 



[ 12] 



PLUM STREET 

UNDER these scrawny ailantus trees 
that the tepid air barely sways, 
coaxing their pink and copper pinched-up tufts 
out into a cloud of ungainly plumes, 
there is already a greenish yellow 
tinge to the light, 
a pallid watery refraction 
and avowal of the long-awaited warm spell. 

A black and white mange-eaten cat, 

all bones and ruffled fur from a winter's prowling, 

rubs its nose and ear against the iron railing 

of 37 Plum Street; 

and turning up at me 

an ingratiating glint of lemon eyes, 

it sleeks itself on the pickets, 

gliding in and out voluptuously, 

like a spotted moray 

coiling and undulating, 

in and out of a tile, 

at the bottom of a pale green tank. 

At the top of the stoop next door, 

a negress with a skin of cinnamon dusted over bronze, 

and eyes of porcelain and moss-agate, 

polishes a brass door-plate, 

till it shines as her straight teeth shine and her oily cheek-bones. 

There is a feeling of May and ten o'clock in the morning 

in the still clear air. 

And the sky-larking sun, 

hitting the corner of the door-plate, 

explodes on it 

a spikey straw-diamond. 

So dazzling is the arc it makes on the smoothed-down letters 

that I have to screw up my eyes to spell out 

Doctor Meaker. 

[ 13] 



Plum Street is like a decayed old man who can hardly limp 

along, 
Plum Street is a dying and dried-up blind backwater 
where the blood of the city no longer runs — 
a lean rectangular strip of caving cobbles, 
two checkered bands of blue-grey flag-stone sidewalks, 
a vacant succession of red-brick, three-story boxes, 
propped up over their areaways 
by stiff steep brown-stone stoops — 
red-brick cubes, 
shoulder to shoulder, 

planned in avarice and dying a stingy death, 
geometrical, inarticulate, expressionless, 
with not so much space between them 
as you could slip a card into, 
and meanly edged out to the last legal inch 
of the lots that they stand upon. 

For seventy years they have been standing here, 

drawn up at attention to nothing, 

looking from their glazed and curtained windows 

through this mesh of scrawny ailantus — 

twelve red boxes on one side, 

twelve red boxes on the other, 

and in front of each a disheartened tree. 

In Plum Street no children have been born for years. 

Only old ladies live here now, 

very old ladies with tiny incomes, 

who never go into the street, 

but sometimes timidly 

draw back, with a shrunken blue-veined hand, 

the dusty lace curtains of the parlour windows, 

to let a faded eye look through. 

And Doctor Meaker has lived here forever, 
and his door-plate is rubbed away 
like a foot-worn tomb-top 
in an ancient church floor. 

[ 14 1 



And for years his only business has been counting the timid 

pulse 
of very old blue-veined ladies 
in their wrists of bone and parchment. 
Doctor Meaker too is very old; 
but, at this time of year, you can always see 
a single maroon and orange tulip 
in a pot in his parlour window — 
a relic of his days of gallantry. 
The doctor still knows when the winter is past 
before the ailantus trees do. 

The oily negress of cinnamon bronze 

and eyes of moss-agate, 

bends at right angles, 

and polishes his door-plate 

into a blinding big straw-diamond. 

There is a caressing something in the air; 
but the shuffling breeze, 
that has lost its way as I have 
and wandered into Plum Street, 
already feels old in this old, old street. 

It scurries a torn newspaper around and around on the side- 
walk; 
then taking hold of the scrawny branches, 
and shaking their thousand pink and copper tufts, 
as if it despised this monotonous decrepitude, 
it spatters in shadows, 

over the curtained decaying parlour windows, 
the sickly simper that the trees 
are making, now at last they see the sudden, 
hilarious face of the spring 
shining up the street like a solid block of gold. 



[ 15 1 



PROFITS 

AFTER a day of revery 
^ watching the river and the tugs 
that pass, soughing and whistling, 
to one another, 

sailing up the street of the river, 
proudly in front of the cliff of the sky-scrapers 
and under the lofty bridges, 
with a loaded barge on either arm — 
after a day of revery and watching, 
do I know any secret? 

The men who own 

the chugging tugs and unresisting barges 

sit in the sky-scrapers 

and count their profits. 

They would laugh at my thoughts, 

if they knew them; 

and I could never find a way to tell them 

what there is in a foaming bow 

or a trail of smoke, 

to make me waste a day 

in profitless gazing 

at the tugs and barges 

that do their bidding. 

There is no mystery, they would say, 
about their errands — 
just freight cars to be transferred 
and bales to be lightered. 

And it is for fear of lawsuits 
and collisions that they have put 
emerald and ruby lamps 
on their creeping boats, 

[ 16] 



now the night has come, 

and not at all to festoon my thoughts 

with chaplets of fire 

and give me hints 

of the birth and death of stars. 



[ 17] 



TRADE 

HER derricks thrust their yellow booms through the lilac air, 
like the naked sticks of a shuffled fan, 

and her wireless sags between slanting masts. 

Rusty teeth of winches chatter and grate, 

as bale after bale, 

jerked up on a tawny rope 

dodders an instant over the river 

to flash from a wailing block 

into the thudding grumble of the hold. 

Like a huge bassoon her loose-lipped whistle flibbers. 

I see the puffed flurry of the steam 

grip her smoke-stack like a hand 

and drift out into lingering torn undulations. 

She is peeling the rooted wharf away from her side 

and her life-boats seem to slide along its pebbled roof. 

Tugs waddle around her whipping the river to a cream of foam ; 

they are panting and ringing frantic little bells; 

they are heaping around her great drab walls 

a snow-drift of heaving steam. 

At last she emerges — 

she strides towards the sea, a-quiver with the shake of her 
engines, 

and the proud lust of the deep water is upon her. 

At last the boiling spine and fluffy silver ribbon of her wake, 

the wet shoulder of her rudder, and her name, and the quicken- 
ing snap-snap 

of her little red flag. 

How flapped about she is with the veering squeal of gulls; 

how dense and foreboding and grey the mist is that she steams 
into; 

how, as I think, like a vast green mass of glass, the sea 

that she will scratch her white hair-line across 

lies immovable in its deep drowned valleys 

and sunken mountains. 

A thousand unconquerable thoughts have become 

her delicate wires and wheels and rods; 

[ 18 I 



a thousand patient hands have fitted them together 

and heaped a fire among them until they have made her creep 

on the bright skin of the sea. 

She is taking a thousand souls with her, 

each with his hands full of treasure, 

each with a lifetime of love and hope 

flowering like a living tree in the hollow of his heart. 

Yet how dim her stern light's wink, now the sun has set. 

So dim and far it seems, that, watching her, I wonder 

how she can ever reach England, 

with her hull no bigger than a water-fly, 

and her humming screw a pin-point 

grazing the filmy face of the unending dark green death. 

And yet can it be she will ever sink down, 

in a fluttering sheath of bubbles, 

to some ledge laid bare like a spectral claw, 

among sodden ocean ranges, 

to rot into the very stuff 

of eternal darkness and silence? 

A dray clanks jangling over the cobbles past the pier; 

its rumble is slashed into bits 

by the sliding clink of the horses' hoofs. 

It is life taking up the unshaken prose of existence. 

It is the clicking of the rushing and eternal looms 

of calculation, 

reeling forever out their unchanging pattern 

of profit and loss, 

that counts her, and all who peer across her trembling rail 

and see no land now, 

only a shuttled thread. 



[ 19] 



BROOKLYN BRIDGE 

I IKE a regiment filing across the sky, 
-^ on every bayonet-tip a white spiked star, 
the electric lights march over the bridge, 
above the river mist 
that curdles in the green moonlight 
to wool that heaves and breathes. 

And like gliding caterpillars of fire 
the trains slide under them, 
creeping, from tower to tower, 
through a flickering lattice of sea-blue shadows. 
Inch after inch they creep, 
one after the other, 

and in the mouth of each the jump and crackle of a splintering 
star. 

Men and women, 

thousands upon thousands, 

sit bolt upright, in passive stolidity, 

in the bellies of these crawling trains. 

Stolidly, and yet impatiently, 

they sit waiting to be spewed out 

near some hollow cube 

that they alone can find 

in the city's wilderness of hollow cubes. 

In some hollow cube 

that each has made his own, 

safe and alone, 

each will lie down 

and compose himself to watch the shadow-play 

of the life he cannot live, 

thrown up like an Aurora 

against the darkness of his sleep. 

For this these bright mechanic worms were made, 
for this the lightening was entangled 

[ 20 ] 



in a cobweb of calculations, 

and made to drag these gliding caterpillars of fire, 

high up through the air, 

against the night. 

Over the bridge, from tower to tower, 

life and death ride side by side, 

sorting their human parcels like postmen, 

and gossiping over the little prodigies of men 

who live to sleep 

and fear to die. 

And something seems laughable to life; 
and something seems laughable to death. 

Above the glow-worm trains, 

and over the river mist 

that the moonlight bleaches, 

the electric lights file like a regiment across the sky, 

on every bayonet-tip a white spiked star. 



[21 ] 



FULTON FISH-MARKET 

FROM the cracked windows of the fish-market 
the straggKng December sun 
leaps down into the murky river 
between two long decrepit piers. 
Millions of rubies, sapphires, opals, 
millions of beryls, blood-stones, topaz, 
millions of emeralds, garnets, jacinthes, 
swim up to meet it. 

Like a Pentacost bubbling from the stagnant water 
they burst and shiver into skimming flames; 
they wink out flashing fins against the rotten piers. 
Like a shoal of blistering sparks they wriggle and wither; 
like a seineful of meteors fished out of darkness. 

Behind, tall as a mountain and slender as a bell-tower, 

a pinnacled apparition 

soars pink and silver out of the sooty mist; 

its topmost window blazes and lightens. 

The sea-gulls see it and desert the river; 

they rise and spire, 

ring-looped in frantic tightening ring, 

and flap like moths around it. 

Far below a tug unwinds a long crimped tress of steam, 
and pushes before it through the murky river 
two little wings of foam. 



[ m ] 



THE BAY: DECEMBER 

SNOW swirls its wavering noiseless fringes against my 
window, 
and its immense impalpable curtain 
obliterates the swarming river 
and the thousand-windowed walls beyond 
of the oflBce buildings. 

Somewhere on the river, 

steamers, blinded and uncertain, 

creep up to their white piers. 

And their groping whistles, 

in faltering mimicry, 

groan and jostle and rebound 

from the thousand-windowed walls of the invisible city. 

Bellowing at one another 

they creep up to their white piers; 

and their whistles are like the trumpetings of bewildered 

elephants 
imprisoned in a treacherous magic. 

On the grey sky the dense driven slant 

and gusty up-swirl of the snow 

sifts a flocking flaky blackness. 

But on the roofs and smokeless chimneys, 

under my window, 

it is deep and white; its whiteness crushes 

the shuttered cubes of the stolid houses. 

The swirling rage of the snow that flies, 
the effacing peace of the snow that has fallen, 
divide the world. 

A tree in a back yard etches itself, 
like an arrested aspiration, 
against a pale blue roof-sign, 
windswept and bare in the whirling greyness, 

[ 23 ] 



that hangs an immeasurable perspective 
over a fading fragment of life 
where nothing is but black and white 
triangles and rectangles. 

A vast monotony consumes existence 

and the mind is muted. 

I gaze without seeing 

into the dense snow's shifting curtain, 

as I gaze into a mood 

from which has been blotted my thought's thronged rivers 

and cities. 
Then suddenly I remember 
the snowy glazes of Sung bowls and vases 
and the ecstasy of black strokes that so long ago 
laid on them 

dragons and the tooth-edged waves and mountains 
of eternity. 

The fluttering hoarse whistles of the creeping ships 

attack the silence of the snow; 

they try to shudder their way through it, 

re-echoing as from the peaks 

of unseen mountains. 

And in my mind those old bowls flicker and fade out, 

leaving the world a lonely sea-crag 

and the fierce on-rush of the obliterating snow 

the teeth and torn wave-summit 

of an engulfing 

eternity. 



[ 24 ] 



THE LIBRARY 

IT is useless to try to push it back from me any longer, 
it has so many tentacles, so many sucking cups; 
and it has slid its way over me, 
clinging and creeping imperceptibly, 
like a snail over a leaf. 

How interchangeable and like cloud-shapes all things are! 

Years ago, 

when the soft tip of it first touched me, 

as a horse's lip reaches for an apple, 

I took it for something else. 

How interchangeable all things are! 
These wrapped and wrapped, constricting layers 
were once the morning when my mind unpeeled, 
astonished, to the within withoutness of the world. 

Books ! — 

In them I could cross all countries, walking in myself; 
I could fling myself, sitting still, into seas that sparkled 
with tropic mornings; 

I could climb among snows that grazed the stars; 
I could lie under oaks, 
by green-lipped, sky-coloured streams; 
I could become as a cloud is 

and journey over the rutted ant-hills of the earth, 
and cross, unimperiled, the scattered bits of looking-glass 
of its seas; 

and like a cloud, again, 
I could be precipitate in passion and rise 
in the exaltation of sap in a million unfolding leaves; 
I could be thought; 

I could see through the mistakes of old kings, 
and watch them, my elbow on my knee, 
grope in their folly, wide-eyed but blind, 
as one watches a mechanical doll in brocade 

[ 25 ] 



stumble pompously across the carpet; 

and I could be a judge, 

in the warmth of a foresight that fell clear 

out of the past, as lamplight falls over a threshold, 

of men's lives lived and to be lived. 

The vision of it went burning out of my head 
and penetrating with its superlight 
the walls of the houses, as I walked by them, 
the walls of my room, when I sat in it. 

From little marks in books over which my spirit skimmed 

effortless, 
I could suck up the past and foreknow the future. 

Now it is useless to struggle against it any longer. 

It has me in its coils like a python turned to stone. 

It is stone and darkness, 

a thing of the innermost jungles of the minds of men; 

it is dark; it is crushing. 

And the great gilded ceiling of the reading room, 

full of echoes and dust and dusty cherubs, 

rests upon my head. 

It must be like this the earth would feel resting on my skull. 

Millions of books are pressed under it 

like grapes in a wine-press, 

but they are like the heads of mummies, 

and there is no wine. 

The terrible ceiling is full of dust and echoes; 

and the clank of some one, who stamps the books he issues, 

becomes 
a kind of thunder in the long room. 

By what sign shall I know into whose eyes the deceptive radi- 
ance has fallen, 

on whose brain the fingering first lip of the first tentacle is 
feeling — 

I who am motionless and visionless in these python coils of 

stone? 

[ 26 ] 



All these bowed heads, under these green-shaded lamps, — 

they cannot all be like me 

withering in the stony coils of the python 

of this jungle of the mind. 

An old man farther down my table 

clears his throat over and over again, 

unconscious. 

His throat is as hard and dry as the throat of a boy 

who is kissing a girl in secret — 

a passion among bones. 

And he, unconscious, pulls me out of my revery. 

His faded eyes shine fiercely on a dirty page. 

There is something on that page, some dream of human hope, 

some revealing statistic that will cure the world, 

that he devours and that devours him. 

I feel like he looks, 

and his hateful enamoured eye 

seems to see something through his book like what I saw, 

years ago, 

when I read my first book. 



[ 27 ] 



RIVER TRAFFIC 

I WATCH them through the bee's wing of the great bridge 
these three vermiHon barges, 
snub-nosed and abreast, 
that a tug pulls on a fan of yellow hawsers 
through the grey-green river. 

They are solemnly sliding far below me 
in a whirling gauze of mottled smoke, 
and the peacock's tail of the tug's wake — 
green and silver and thousand-eyed — 
slips backward like a revery 
under their red bows. 

How impotent I am 

that I stand and idly watch them, 

because, if I take one step, my helpless body 

will drop like lead through the air 

and drown in the water. 

If I could only tie to my resolute shoulders 
these vast veined drooping wings 
of the quivering bridge! 



[ 28 ] 



THE PARK 

I ALONE am alive to-night 
among these trees and lawns 
that December has made its own; 
and, walking over the ice-glazed paths, 
I alone see the wind drive 

the glittering mesh of the sleet through the dark, 
and encase the trees, from trunk to tiniest twig, 
in tinkling crystal. 

The park is millions on millions of diamonds, 

twinkling out of a clear clinging matrix 

of milk-opal and moonstone; 

it is gleaming and stiff with a heartless and lyric emotion, 

sealed in perfection. 

And its beauty is more terrible and lovelier than 

the deep boweriness or any soft smoulder of emerald fire 

the spring or summer has ever known. 

I alone 

am alive to-night in this park, I alone see, 

in the night, and on the sleet that whistles freezing through 

the dark, 
the dotted sapphire arc lamps describe 
rings of iridescence and rainbow globes, 
that crooked gem-encrusted boughs 
throw their crinkle and scintill across. 

And I feel that life has never given to me 

the fleckless flame of insight 

that is mine as I walk, 

from iridescent ring through iridescent ring 

of spectral blue lamplight, 

where, out of snow-smoothed plots of grass, 

here a Judas-tree, 

there a lilac-bush sends up 

a silent and motionless spray 

blown in the glass of the sleet 

at the wind's whim. 

[ 29 ] 



My spirit, like the trees, 

puts on a cold and glistening ecstasy 

to see the wind drive 

the rainbow mesh of the sleet through the sparkling dark, 

and to feel that I alone am alive 

in the sleet-sheathed park, 

now its loveliness is loveliest. 

It was for this that the buds were unfolded, 

little crease by crease, when they pushed apart their purple 

sheathes, 
and filled a morning of May 
with a tremulous overlapping leafiness, 
and heart-disturbing scent and sly amazement of flowers. 

It was for this, the thick drawn curtain, lover-haunted, 

the sleep-suggesting shade of these cedars in summer, 

and the sifting filter, through the frost-tanged air, 

of a whole people of spinning, descending, brown and scarlet 

leaves, 
and the plucking bare of branches against the whitening skies 
of October. 

There is a woman for whom my desire 

is sealed in perfection; 

there is a woman who has put our love's fire, 

like this park that December has made its own, 

beyond the ferment and paroxysm of spring, 

or August's attainment, 

or October's mortality of red and gold quiescence. 

And she is my Judas-tree and my lilac 

ensheathed in rock crystal and opal — 

a glistening spray on the snow-smoothed lawn of my youth. 

And I, who alone have known 

the whole year of her loveliness, 

love more than our summer's tenderness or spring's wet eyes 

this pure clear glitter 

she makes to-night across my thought's bright rings 

and globes of iridescence. 

[ 30 1 



A RAINY NIGHT 

THE rain keeps falling in my face 
and, under my feet, the flag-stones and the asphalt 
are a gleaming mirror 

crackled with fissures and seamed with ruddy trickles 
dripped from the tail-lights of crawling motors — 
a gust-dimmed mirror where dim hanging 
twisted 
rumpled 

shadows of houses walk as I walk; 
and where the ghosts of lamp-posts march and run 
out in shaken flame-lichened ladders 
that wheel and bundle themselves into 
faggots of burning mist. 

I walk and walk, through the rain, on a gleaming mirror 

and, under the flapping shadows of my feet, 

go swimming blotches of shimmering windows, 

like schools of jelly-fish 

stirred into light by a black ship's shoulder 

pushing its way, at night, 

through the still Sargasso Sea. 

I walk and walk, 

carrying over the flag-stone's mirror 

the bright procession of my thoughts. 

I think of rivers that hold reflected 

the bluest of tapering tiled and tiered pagodas 

in Fukien; 

and Paduan bas-reliefs of Judith, 

oily with high lights where she clutches 

the lifeless curls of the giant's head. 

I think of a picture that Degas painted — 
his woman who combs a girl 's long hair 
by ripples creeping on a sunny shore, 

[31 ] 



where the wayward Hit of a sea-gull's wing 
shifts through the shape of the bathing suit 
spread out on the hard white sand. 

I think of a diptych of Theodora — 

gold and ivory and bound in blood-stones — 

with hands uplifted, 

grandiose, 

serene, 

erect in massive robes of cloth of pearls, 

she of the great fixed eyes and furtive brain, 

the mutinous circus and the throne that blazed. 

I think of clumps of pale skunk cabbage 

fanning broad leaves in the sifted light, 

by a brook that sees, 

through a trellis of slender foam-white birches, 

the smile and twinkling eye 

of wind anemones. 

I think and wonder if life's confusion 

has in it some hidden diagram 

of beauty, could one find it, like those strange 

starry designs that underlie 

the numbers of Pythagoras. 

My mind is a world of ancient things 

and all the loveliness that I have loved — 

memories 

from many centuries long dead 

and ruined cities, 

and from last year and from yesterday, 

distinct yet living in community. 

So with these drifting thoughts that come to me 
unsummoned as I walk through the rain — 
with blue pagodas, with Degas' picture, 
with Paduan Judiths, with great-eyed Theodora, 

[ 32 ] 



with cabbage-leaves and reed-like birches, 

whiter than foam, and Pythagorean stars, 

I will put into my mind this mystic night, — 

though all these fugitive bright things 

that I carry along inside of my eye 

and see so clearly through the rain, 

the sword-shaped mirror of the rain-swept street 

catches no drip, no least lost glimmer of; 

though the asphalt only knows, 

row after row, 

houses hanging with light-incrusted 

faces inverted in a film of rain — 

a shadowy canyon of pendant houses; 

and by them, row on row, 

the blurred black wriggle of twisted lamp-posts 

swinging ladders and balls and faggots 

of burning mist. 



[ 33 ] 



SKY-SIGNS 

THIS is the hour when the city 
puts off its glittering scales of sunlight 
on a thousand panes, 

and lays aside the rumbling shackles of its preoccupations, 
and draws about itself 
veils and the quiet shimmer of mists. 

The sinking sun 

spreads upward through the darkening air 

a fan of silver radiance. 

And as the rumble and hum dies down 

into the pearly row of lamps along the quay 

and the gleam, here and there, of lighted windows, 

sky-signs of silver gilt, 

like pale fire-works threaded on a mesh of wire, 

begin to ripple and fling, 

over and over and over again, 

kittens that play with skeins of stars 

and eagles flapping flaming wings 

across the soft subsiding plumes of steam 

in the chimney-pots. 



I watch the sun sink, 

and the sky-signs turn their silver gilt to gold; 

while higher than they, 

higher than the teeth of the sky-scrapers even, 

a fleet of swollen clouds blown out of the sea 

steers into the West. 



Like a file of sails laid trim for a secret harbour, 
like a fleet of misty far-voyaging sails, 
the billowy, darkly distended clouds 
slide, filling and sagging, 

over the white and gold pulsation of the sky-signs. 

[ 34 ] 



I see them as sails, but another might see them as 

giant cornucopias 

trailing on their pointed ends, 

now the amber half-buried sun, 

reaching from behind them, 

smudges their tumbled fruit with dusty heliotrope, 

and rubs on all their wickerwork of shadows 

carmine and gold leaf. 

Deepening and still deepening, 

the kindled petals of the sunset close 

in the dark blue field of the sky, 

like the closing of a slender lily 

single in a bed of violets. 

The wheel of things is padded in its drone. 

And, as I watch the clouds, 

a tree of contemplation, 

heavy with flowers that droop like heavy eyes, 

grows up, in a garden of my mind, 

where I have sought and never found before 

silence and peace. 

It puts its roots 

down among the streets and houses of the city, 

as a magnolia puts its roots 

under the swarming world of a grassy lawn. 

Contemplation grows up in my mind 

like a magnolia tree, 

and under it, as the sunset fades, I seem to sit 

with the islanders of a lost island, 

watching their gods spill out of red and golden baskets 

coco-nuts, oranges, and necklaces of shining shells — 

fabulous gifts and familiar. 

And yet I know, as I sit among them, 

that the vision they see and the fruits of their desire 

are only Magellan's sails 

trailing on the virgin sea, 

[35] 



big with a world that from under their wings 

will sweep like a wind and crumple up the island 's gods, 

and set in their stead, over the rounding horizon, 

a stiff unanswering silver-gilded sky-sign 

across the sunset. 



[36] 



BACKGROUNDS 

I WANT to rinse my eyes 
in the coolness of the peace 
of still lakes 

among snowy mountains; 
I want to bathe my mind 
in the monotony 
of the sea's white-lipped thunder. 

But the tremor of life 
working in brick and iron, 
and in the hearts of men, 
is here, not there. 

And the fusing arc 
of hidden purpose 
that, fiercely bright, 
sputters showers 
of burning deeds 
that fall like the jet 
of a spiritual fountain 
through the valleys 
of our darkness, 
is here, not there. 

Like a drop-curtain 
I have hung 
quiet hills 
and quiet trees 
and quiet seas 

across the background of my mind, 
while I ache upon these pavements, 
stunned and blinded 
by the great arc of life 
that sputters so intensely 
and melts the strongest 
[37] 



and the most far-visioned 
into the lavas 
of the crawling mass 
it moulds. 

I have wanted to rinse my eyes 
in the coolness of peace; 
I have wanted to bathe my mind 
in some immense monotony. 



[ 38 ] 



PART II 



HUSH BEFORE STORM 

SAttBOATS, sliding inch by inch 
like butterflies crawling on a sheet of glass, 
draw the white pyramids of their shadows 
across the sleepy lack-lustre lake, 
through sprinklings of the wind's silver dust. 

The summer air is full of restless languors 

that finger at the sails, then let them hang 

listless and limp; 

a thunder-shower blooms, like an immense black water-lily, 

behind rain-hungering still elms, 

and the smoke-stack of the saw-mill is its stem. 

I cannot tell this darkness and foreboding 
that is seeping into the air, 
from the deep and passionate twilight 
that is slowly spreading its cloud-like petals 
through my mind. 

You are a mood in my mind; 

your lightening is waiting to strike from behind the hill. 

And, in this hushed and deepening interval, 

my thoughts, like limp pyramids of sails, 

slide their white shadows, 

inch by inch, over the glassy lack-lustre lake 

of my memory. 



[41 ] 



LEAVING CALIFORNIA 

TREES with tossing deep green leaves 
and leaves that are red as blood is 
stumble away backwards, jumping from shape to shape, 
bulge with nearness, 
dwindle at a stroke with distance, 
melt into a mist that clings to their branches, 
like things in a moving picture — 
an unending hurrying reel of trees 
with deep green leaves and leaves the colour of blood. 

Already, receding and far away, 

as at the wrong end of a telescope, 

the brown little wooden houses of Berkeley 

perched, solemn and deserted, 

among up-flung, back-falling, quiet fountains of gum-trees. 

Grey tanks stuck up stiff on stilts of steel 

in thick black pools of oil — gone, 

whirled into space, whisked away 

over the limitless southward-sagging plain, 

where skeleton crosses, 

sharp on the evening sky 

and rigid and desolate, 

hold up scalloped lines of fat black wires 

and file away obliquely across the plain, 

toward distant haze-enraptured hills — 

hills puckered with violet gullies like the spokes of a wheel. 

Pitch darkness within it, like the boring of a drill, 

the steady whirring grinding of the train; 

and, as I lie in my berth, 

the strong half -dream, half -thought, 

of being drawn relentlessly, and always conscious, 

across the continent . . . 

[ 42 ] 



This is not something that I have willed or made, 

this far-reaching surrender, 

this passive fulfillment of a desire. 

Nothing is mine — 

neither the ingenuity, 

nor the energy, 

nor the determination, 

nor the labour, 

nor the land that clatters away under the floor of the car, 

not an arm's length from my shoulder, 

in a whirlpool of dust and cinders, — 

the immovable land that would crush me against itself, 

if I even touched it now, — 

nor the mountains we will twist our way through, 

nor the swamps and creeks that we are skirting, 

nor the flickering leap of the bridges 

we clang across. 

I have no root or friend in all this wide deep darkness, 
nor so much claim to the red glint of a signal-lantern 
as a bee has to a fuchsia flower. 

I have only hired permission to lie down in this six-foot cur- 
tained box 
that I may submit to a translation 
hardly less strange than death. 
And though I have no threshold that I move to, 
no part in any future of the land, 
they have wrapped me in a frenzied energy 
that hurtles me, 
between bowing grasses 
and tossing trees, 
hour after hour, unceasingly. 
In the fury of a dream 
through the long unbroken night, 
hands heap fuel and still more fuel 
into the rage of the fire that swings us onward. 

[43 ] 



I am hurried like a messenger of fate — 

rushed forward by magic, as though an empire were doomed 

to totter, 
if I fail to come. 

Men burn up their brains and die, 
wear out their bodies into wrinkles and bones, 
for me, while I lie here in this berth that I have hired. 

I am become a level far-flying arrow; 

sheathed in this mechanism that minds I do not know have in 

their keeping, 
I am a dragon-fly skimming and shooting and zigzagging, 
irresponsible, between the seas. 

By an act of faith, 

I crumple up time and space, 

as I crumple in my hand a sheet of paper 

covered with a thousand figures 

and the deductions and the incredulity 

of the ages. 

For a mere coin 

I put my lips to the future 

and I make my own the cluttered and unwilling past. 

And they are interlocked, commingled, interfused, 

and flicker through my mind 

in a dissolving and unseizable panorama. 

Pitch darkness huddled on endless emptiness 
slit up and ripped and revealed 
by the shaking shears of the engine's backfire. 
Then, suddenly through flat long lean layers of mist 
hung over bunches of marsh grass 
by the side of the track, 

a white sign flashing and fading and flashing again 
EDISON; 

and rising at me out of the rushing night 
an old dilapidated paddle-wheel steamer 

[ 44 ] 



embedded in rotting reeds and mud, 

beside a dilapidated pier — 

the ghost of some nameless estuary 

shining in our head-light's glare, 

and bare and white 

as a steer's skull lying under the moonlight 

by a clump of sage bush in Arizona. 



[ 45 ] 



FOR ELLIE COME BACK 

MY eyes keep saying that this is you, 
dear and unchanged, and yet I know 
that now somehow I think as I have never thought 
of you; and something gives my eyes the he. 
I look into your eyes. They are the same; 
they have their old quick light in them, 
inquisitive of life. But your restless mouth, 
and your freckled thought-pursuing hands, 
and your long straight fingers white like tapers — 
now, though why I cannot tell you, they will always be 
a little strange to me. 

You who went where the light turned strange, 

and the walls of the room gave way, 

and your pillows were shaken till they were mist — 

you who so wondered whom you could find 

whose life would have made him look back at life, 

sometime from somewhere, where none knows the way — 

you, loving your life, who went wondering 

who, here among us, would know you still, 

if you reached, if you could, and touched them from there, 

and told them for us that you still were here — 

is it strange to you that we have you still, 

as it is to me.^ Or was your will 

so sure of its strength against the rushing thing 

that was laying its hands on you, 

and pushing the walls of the room away 

like clouds, and making your pillows mist, 

that even then you knew 

no fear of what might he? 

Or simply did it seem to you 
that what had been, and what would be, 
lived only as they lived in you, 
and what held them together for us and you, 

[ 46 ] 



in the whole our thought makes out of the world, 

was only the breath you drew? 

Did you feel what had been could only be 

if you clung to the breath you drew? 

And they, did they know — those over there 

who in life knew you — 

that you lived, when the rushing was wildest and 

the whole of your life in your hand was sand 

you could not grasp, and your body a burning stone, 

by the strength that was in your will alone? 

Or did you only see them stand 

and watch and wonder, from their calm cold impotence, 
what made your strong will stronger than the thing 
that had hold of you sweeping you out of your life, 
as a great wind sweeps a leaf from a tree? 

You do not know; your eyes say that, 

and you fought alone. 

And I do not know, for my eyes keep saying to me to-day 

that the walls of your room are these solid walls of stone. 

I only know — though why I cannot tell — 

that now, somehow, your restless mouth, 

and these long freckled hands of yours will always be 

a little strange to me. 



[47] 



FROM A CLIFF 

SOMEWHERE in temple-gardens paved with jade 
and plaques of erysolite, 
are flowers a thousand years of coaxing hands 
have made as rootless, blue-lipped, golden-shelled 
as candle-flames that leave a stiffened wick 
and float on their own throbbing in the air. 
Somewhere old wisdom seeps in witchery, 
and art has signs and whispers to transform 
life's passions and its poisons and decays, 
its raw strength and its seething ardours into 
the disembodied texture of a dream. Somewhere thought 
opens its lovely and terrible leaves 
like a great lotus that the heaped-up grief 
of all the ages smoulders around in incense 
and flushes through with fragrance. But to me 
no water dipped in bowls, of which the lip, 
leaf-thin, was pressed from starlight or the glaze 
rinsed in deep moonlight, quickens the dry strands 
of these wild roots I cling with to this cliff 
that lowers a grassless head into the wind 
and stares down with old blinded eyes upon 
the great grey slab of the sea — 
the great grey quiet slab of the rain-laid sea 
where like a filigree of little leaves, 
innumerable as stars or prairie-flowers, 
or like little waves that shake their glinting curls, 
take hands and creep into the setting sun, 
a whole world's staggering agony and despair 
crawls in a tracery of black and gold, 
crinkling and untransfigured and remote. 
I have no wisdom to transmute its pain, 
no gardener's immemorial 
art to evoke thought's white atoning flower. 
My mind is of the essence of this cliff, 
my heart is of the essence of the sea. 

[ 48 ] 



NORTHERN LIGHTS 

BY a great northern river, under a pine-tree, 
they sat as if embedded 
in the rock crystal of the autumn night. 
The fields slumbered, 
the trees and the rail-fences took 
darkness into themselves and the silence of slumber; 
the long road ran out to a setting star, 
and the last bird was gone. 
No rapture hung about the bare stripped land 
or beckoned from one last untimely flower. 
But out of the frozen seas of the electric North 
the spinning earth let play 
gigantic forces 

across the thumping of their yearning hearts. 
The earth put words into his mouth — 
he said, "I love you." 
And from their heads their souls stood up 
like twisting and embracing 
columns of misty light 
into the heavens. 

From hamlets and farm-houses far away, 
beyond the great river and the pine forests 
and the frost-bright rim of the hills, 
enthralled eyes saw a myriad-hued Aurora 
lick, with sinuous intertwining rapture and aspiring flames, 
among the hard clear stars. 



[ 49 ] 



A BUST OF BAUDELAIRE 

NOT grey ancestral glaciers groping down, 
because some shifting solstice warmed the land, 
polished these onyx eyes or bit the frown 
of basalt on these cloud-outcleaving brows. 
To nature's fouler processes he bows 
who must; but these, self -sculpturing from within, 
modelled their mask with thought's unfaltering hand. 
Elsewhere they graze the glacier; many a fin 
and paw obscene recall to them how queer 
the unfolding squirm of things, and being wet, 
vicarious, serve the basalt brows for sweat, 
the onyx eyes for tears as, undebased 
even with such sweat, such tears, they rest this leer 
on offal offerings before offalous idols placed. 



[50] 



REWARDS 

HOW should I let them sweat, 
under the sun, 
in the fields that they must reap, 
because the striped cheeks 
of apples, 

round and red against the blue sky, 
and apple leaves 
plaiting green patterns 
into the low wistful light, 
have put an enchantment 
between their world and me, 
where I sit in this indolent shade 
and make a net of words. 

I see the mowers file, 

diminutive and black, 

on the brink of the hill, 

across the face of a lavender cloud 

that has taken the shape 

of a great seated idol 

rimmed in a thin gold wire. 

Like beetles the mowers creep along, 

reaping the knee-deep gold of the grain. 

And the shadow 

through which the spark of their scythes goes 

is a longer and longer 

finger of purple. 

Are they the puppets of their own labour .^^ 
Has the seed they flung 
in after the fleeing snow 
become these sun-coloured sheaves 
that beckon 

to the snow that will fly to-morrow, 
only to wring out their minds 
in the reaping 
and leave them empty? 

[51 ] 



Or has the grateful earth, 
now her redundant motherhood 
is garnered, given in reward 
her elemental vision, 
her simple peace, 
to them? 

The red cheeks 

of these unplucked apples 

darken against the purpling 

sky. 

Perhaps the twilight ripples 

of the thrill I feel 

in watching them darken 

is the tremor of a living line 

writing in my mind 

the message of the harvest 

and of the mowers' mute labour. 

Perhaps this thrill that fringes my thoughts, 

as a gold rim circumscribes 

the seated cloud idol 

beyond the hill, 

is the reward of my renunciations 

and surer than theirs. 

The mowers pass 

under the boughs of the orchard, 

plodding silently home. 

Their eyes are eyes 

already half asleep; 

their faces are imprisoned in a great 

and lonely weariness. 

How have I let them sweat 

under the sun 

in the fields that they have reaped — 

[ 52 ] 



I who in helpless idleness 

sit here and watch 

the wind tumble down 

the cloud idol of the sunset 

into a shapeless heap of mist, 

and in its place a sudden star 

float up, 

between the sheaf-spotted fields 

and the leaf-spotted sky, 

while alien still to my own life, 

and alien to theirs, 

I spread for this dividing enchantment 

a net of words? 



[53 ] 



DOORS For Kingsley Porter 

I TRY to think on what cathedral door that I have seen 
the multitude of man's abandoned thoughts with solemnest 
gesture half hide and half make manifest 
the silent parable of outlived aspiration, 
in symbols and grey slowly flaking stone. 

For it is by a door 

on which my spirit has wrought its own 

vision of life, 

and on the night and in the alien stuff of living 

has left an intricate legend's trace, 

hard I have dreamed for the unreckoning days to efface, 

that I must go alone, unflinchingly, 

from dark faith to truth's inner revelation. 

And I have always thought that door will seem to me, 

when at last this film has fallen from my eyes, 

like some cathedral's sculptured portal; 

and it will have around it, 

marshalled and massed, 

on jamb and tympanum and lintel, 

hierarchies, angels, patriarchs, 

apostles, martyrs, bishops, virgins, popes, 

saints, soldiers, seers, and those whom life has humbled, 

hewn on its mouth of darkness; 

mitres and tablets and sceptres there will be, 

crosses and copes, 

censers and images of forgotten things, 

mandorlas full of broad bright wings, 

wisdom that no one now remembers, 

and all the healing tender leaves 

of the entwining vine of life; 

and eyes and hands will be in it that soar, 

with ecstasy and faith grown younger for its thousand years, 

up to the death that they have made their birth; 

and for our saddened earth, 

[ 54 ] 



its tears, and more for all its laughter, 

in a confirmed pure knowable hereafter, 

there there will be 

some sword-sharp clean division of its fears and hopes. 

I try to think on what embrasured deep cathedral door 

the doctrine and unfolding of my soul 

will see its image, 

before I put my hand against the door, 

and pass into the sanctuary. 

But only on the night, behind my closed eyes, 

a figure stands up, very tall and hung, 

with white straight robes that fall 

unfluttering from his slender straightness down. 

I cannot see his face; but, slowly swung 

about him, shadows move, 

till on the darkness he becomes, 

from brow and hands to clinging robe and sandals, 

a glowing idol hewn in alabaster, 

as though within him burned aloof 

a crucifix of candles. 

I cannot see his face; I do not know 

his story, and I cannot even guess 

what gives him claim to this translucent glory, 

this singleness. 

Perhaps he is the guardian of the place, 

perhaps he is myself that might have been, 

refracted through some hope that once I had. 

And, having seen how life has dealt with me, 

and knowing how my eyes are blind with seeking, 

and deafness has my ears from those false voices 

so long my heart's own whisper, 

it may be that he stands there now to see 

if, of his compassionate grace, 

that solitude and all my hungering anguish 

have given root to grow 

simple and strong, 

[55] 



and with no other sign than this benignant glow, 

as of a crucifix of candles 

set in the snow 

of clearest alabaster, 

he may not lead me now 

this merciful film is still upon my eyes, 

in through the door of my abandoned thoughts 

through which alone I cannot go. 



[56] 



CATERPILLARS 

LIKE this curling twisting worm 
-^ hung from a bough, 
dropping, stopping an instant as if in doubt, 
then dropping again, 

at the end of his ghstening birth-thread — 
dropping and revolving in the breeze, 
stopping and swaying out of his earthward gropings 
on the billows of his silver thread, 
I live towards another life. 

Suspended in this leafy greenness of to-day, 

I am dropping from my bough 

of ancestry 

that is no more to me than a sustaining thread 

I hang from and turn in my preoccupation — 

dropping, stopping an instant of instinct baffled, 

then dropping again 

to the serene earth that waits for me, 

with something serene down under its dead leaves — 

the darkness that I know will give 

wings to the dream 

that I cannot quite dream. 

How full of murmurings and deep tranquillity 

it is here under our trees, O worm, 

in the midst of the unhindering air! 

And how this sun-splashed under-leaves light 

is fluttered through with the linked palpitations 

of amorous butterflies! 



[57] 



SULTRINESS IN JUNE 

THIS turgid June afternoon 
hangs upon the white petal-beaded cones 
of the chestnut-blossoms, 
heavily with heavy desirous hands. 
It buries its mouth in the arbour 
where your wistaria trails, 
bloom over grape-like clustered bloom, 
reluctant to the summer 
in their virginal pale lavender, 
drooping like things asleep in pools 
of their own unspreading perfume. 

There is no sun in the moody eyes 

of this afternoon; 

but in its nostrils clings 

a pungent scent of gums 

that roots and snake-like branches shed 

in slow tears, drop by drop, 

dripping into a jungle stream. 

The noises of the arbour 

are feverish and make 

an uncoiling sound, 

smothered and aching with the numbness 

of too much life; 

something would break its bounds; 

something will soon 

give way to an ache 

it cannot harbour. 

There is something that aches 

at the roots of the trees 

in the moist hot ground. 

But you, in your breathing lace — 
you are not aware 
of the hunger that hangs 
in the sullen stifling air. 

[ 58 ] 



In your cool white lace, 

you are like the chestnut-blossoms 

that only know that they bloom; 

in this languid lavender scarf, 

you are like your arbour 

of wistaria 

that, virginal to the summer, 

dangles drenched in pools 

of its own unshaken perfume. 

And talking in this tepid shade 

that your mind has made 

that its noon may not lose 

its morning's cool, 

nothing in you hears 

the swish of fish that gasp 

among the lily-pads, 

in your faintly steaming garden-pool. 

You talk your way 

through this turgid June afternoon, 

and your words flit, 

flashing across the darkness 

that my thoughts have made in me, 

like green and vermilion parrots 

flitting about the earth-bound boughs 

of a banyan tree, 

in some oppressive tropic summer. 

You talk and, hating you, 
I still pretend to listen. 
The ache and sullenness 
of lightening flashes flat between 
walls of horizon clouds, 
and deep under, 
as if the earth itself 
shifted in distress, 

there is an imprisoned and incessant 
rumble of far-off thunder. 
[ 59 ] 



CHIMERA 

THIS spectral thing that unsheathes in my brain 
its claws, as if it dreamed and gripped its dream, 
whose stifling wings beat on me and whose beak 
stabbingly searches at my heart, has preyed — 
inscrutable, protean, fugitive — 
on the whole world since ever the world was. 
And now it flares a flower, now fades a moon, 
now rustles in the husks of pain 
that are a mother 's death, a baby's birth — 
now threads with thought's grey-glistening spider-webs 
music of shrivelling strings and flame-tongued brass. 
It loiters in an amber temple set 
high on a green crag over the sea; it fills 
the smoke of sinuous naves with a blood-red hush 
and flushing smoulder of dead legends, — laughs 
when a sudden breeze upon a drowsy pool 
flings handfuls of dark ripples; and it whirls 
through the night great screws of shuddering steamships and 
shakes dawn down faltering sails on the irised sea. 
It scrawls the brief tale of an empire on 
this ribbed hot sand that gnaws a flaking stone 
carved with the impotent wisdom of a king, 
and skims past flocking faces in the street, 
and lives in furtive phrases winged with bloom 
of fiery thoughts. It is and never is, 
fashioning all things, and of all things in 
all ages makes and mocks their sure decay. 
TJnseizable fanged pitiless fugitive! 
Your claws, are they 
my thoughts, my love the straining of your wings .^ 



[60] 



WILD GEESE: A SYMBOL 

I IKE a slit in the twilight's reedy green, 
-^ a thread of a moon 
and seven great birds, 
beside it, in a wavering wedge 
of flight 

before the night. 

With bow-tense wings and yearning necks 
they fly and ply their fire-quick eyes — 
lunge like a spear through the sapphire drip 
and shudder of the evening star. 
The seven great birds 
are seven shells 
that swing and shift 
and fluctuate 
on intervals 

that scrawl beside the evening star, 
in a soundless score on the crystalline 
dark, 

the quivering agony 
and crash of shattering bells. 
The seven great birds 
are seven flecks . . . 

Night's dome's dense jagged edge slides down 
against black islands in the West; 
like the jaw of a monster massively 
it shuts, 

and, out of a listless cloud, 
crushes a crawling clot of light 
that simmers into opal oil, 
lank iridescent coil on languid coil, 
on the indigo sea. 
The seven great birds 
are seven stars 
on the blackening clot 
between sky and sea — 
like a thought their undulant angle skims, 
between the remorseless jaws of the night, 
after the light. 

[ 61 ] 



